It sounds hollow now. Africa’s problems only deepened this year. The AIDS pandemic raged unchecked. Burundi’s oppressive minority resisted Mandela’s browbeating. Congo’s war wore on. The world’s biggest U.N. mission, in Sierra Leone, broke down. The leaders of South Africa and Nigeria, who had appeared best equipped to help steer the continent toward recovery, both stumbled at home. Zimbabwe and Cote d’Ivoire, once among the continent’s most stable countries, veered toward anarchy. And clearly solving these problems mainly will be left to Africans. Finally, the U.S. election raised a question about the future: for Washington, will Africa still matter?
Whatever Bush wants, he must beware. Africa blotted Clinton’s presidency. Devastated by the mob killings of U.S. servicemen in Somalia in 1993, Clinton’s team blocked any U.N. response to the Rwandan genocide. Sympathy for the genocide victims led him too close to the victors in Rwanda and their chief backer, Uganda. He bought into the concept that they and others might constitute the nucleus of an “African Renaissance” built on solid economic growth rates.
Clinton’s 1998 tour of the continent was a high-water mark for this overly optimistic vision. A new generation of African leaders was poised to uplift their region, he declared. No other American president had ever made such an extensive tour of Africa. The euphoria was short-lived. Congo’s neighbors invaded, U.S. allies Eritrea and Ethiopia went to war and Islamic fundamentalists bombed U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Still, Clinton followed up with a second African mission to newly democratic Nigeria, last fall. If nothing else, he raised Africa’s profile. During Clinton’s second term nearly every cabinet secretary visited the continent.
Africans liked the attention, but wanted much more from Washington. They complained of racism when the West drove Milosevic out of Kosovo but wouldn’t intervene in Sierra Leone. Last January’s “month of Africa” at the United Nations blunted such criticism. Washington came up with an additional $100 million to fight AIDS internationally, bringing U.S. spending to $340 million. That’s nowhere near what the United Nations says is needed for prevention and treatment in Africa, where 25 million people are infected–$3 billion a year. Washington paid $435 million toward debt relief. But congressional Republicans tried to block all spending for U.N. peacekeeping operations in Africa.
Africa can expect even less from the next administration. In the second presidential debate, George W. Bush said that Africa does not “fit into” U.S. strategic interests. And although Bush’s prospective top foreign-policy aides are African-American, neither has so far shown any sentimental attachment to Africa. Colin Powell, the designated secretary of State, is a career military man steeped in the doctrine that U.S. troops shouldn’t serve under foreign command. Condoleezza Rice, the front runner to be national-security adviser, was a Soviet expert in Ronald Reagan’s White House.
To the Bush White House, Africa will first mean oil. The United States already imports nearly as much oil from Africa as from the Middle East and the share will grow with the recent discovery of huge reserves in the Gulf of Guinea, chiefly off Angola. Insiders know the territory; Vice President-elect Dick Cheney until recently led Halliburton Co., the oil-services giant, a major player on the Africa scene. And Rice is on the board of Chevron. Oil politics could reinforce U.S. reliance on Nigeria to tame regional conflicts. The first test of the strategy will come early next year when U.S.-trained Nigerian troops arrive in Sierra Leone.
New efforts by African leaders to address their own predicament may matter the most. Eritrea and Ethiopia this month agreed to end a war that killed tens of thousands. Heads of state finally are jointly confronting the AIDS emergency. A continent-wide summit conference in Nigeria on the crisis early next year will be a first. The most powerful leaders are pressing for a comprehensive approach to Africa’s most crushing problems. Nigeria, South Africa and Algeria are on the verge of presenting an Africa-wide economic program, the “Millennium Africa Recovery Plan,” or MAP, to Western leaders. That may not be the first thing to land on George W. Bush’s desk. But much as the new U.S. administration may want to put its energies elsewhere, Africa inevitably will again command the world’s attention before long. Mass starvation in Somalia prodded the elder George Bush to act in 1993. His son will be no less vulnerable to the troubled continent’s way of forcing itself onto the agenda.
